Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Cetus. Today is Friday the 30th of May,

and this is episode 1176, and I'm joined today by Firas and by Luca. And we're going to discuss

how Britain is broke, how the Wheel of Time TV series turn everyone, including men, into lesbians,

and how it's so over for Harry Potter.

But we have two announcements to make. To make number one, we have a gold Zoom meeting at 3pm.

See you all there. And we're selling courses. In case you don't know, we're selling the

Trivium. This is a bundle of courses, but you also can see them individually.

The courses are foundations of writing, foundations of logic and foundations of rhetoric.

I think there are the courses of academic agent. I don't think I know, basically. So definitely

check them out. Check them out. Right. So should we go to a first segment, which is a very jolly segment

about how all of us are broke? So I wanted to sort of explain why Britain is broke, and I wanted to

start with a bit of a technical story and explain what it actually means. The labor government,

Rachel Reeves, in her eternal genius,

has decided that she wanted to do something with pensions. And what she wants to do is to force everybody who is on a direct contribution pension fund. It means that you're actually paying

into your pension to actually have

that money in mega funds that are at least 25 billion, but then she also wants to force these pension

funds to invest at least a portion of their assets in projects that suit her, be it equities in Britain

or be it financing infrastructure or perhaps one day buying government debt.

Now, why does this matter? Because the only responsibility of a fund manager, typically in Britain, of somebody

who you give money to manage these assets for you, their only responsibility is to you as a

shareholder or to you as a customer whose money is being managed. That's the extent of it. They don't have any sort of you have to do this in the national interest. You have to do this for the sake of the state. The Chinese do it and they do it with some success, but they do it actually for the benefit of Chinese citizens, whereas there is a bit of a complicating factor

here in that these guys think that they want to save the world. Go on. Can I have a question? So basically

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